Patch 5.3 interview with Ghostcrawler
Mystery of the Unborn Val'kyr
The latest patch 5.3 news
All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsThe Wrath you never saw
by Matthew Rossi 
Dec 28th 2009 at 5:00PM
We're all familiar with the strange case of Azjol-Nerub. Originally it was intended to be a complete underground zone that players were to level in, do quests, and so on. Then that was scrapped and we instead got two instances and an NPC who was clearly the remnant of a once far more expansive plot. It's a shame, too, because those two instances are tantalizing hints at how vast and expansive an Azjol-Nerub zone could have been. Frankly, I found (and still find) the Nerubian architecture in those instances far superior to Naxx both in design and its surprising color palette. And when you look around Ahn-Katet and realize how vast the cavern is and how little of it is actually seen in the instance, or run Trial of the Crusader and fall into yet another astonishingly vast and underused space, I don't see how you can not wonder why the Azjol-Nerub zone never manifested itself. Perhaps we'll see World of Warcraft: Underground at some point.
But while in Azjol-Nerub we have a zone that failed to materialize, in Crystalsong Forest we have a fully developed zone with floating, magically altered forests of shattered crystal trees filled with ruins and NPC's and... no real point. There's two flight points, one for each faction, but you could easily miss them because why would you go to them with Dalaran floating right there overhead anyway and no quests to drive you down to them? Why does each faction need its own flight point in the region? Are they fighting over some objective? What is it?
Likewise, Dalaran's presence is intended to somehow oppose the Blue Dragonflight but aside from erecting yet another giant purple bubble (man, they love giant purple bubbles) they don't really seem to be doing anything to all those Blue Dragonflight mobs floating around on flying platforms in the zone. You get sent to Crystalsong by the Argent Crusade a couple of times, first off when they're pushing into Icecrown and then after they've erected their tournament and want you to kill satyrs for scrying crystals or knock out the Black Knight's squire.
This just begs the question: why is the Black Knight's squire in Crystalsong? Why are the satyrs there? There are ancient night elf ghosts haunting the ruins, the Blue Dragonflight, this zone should be positively bustling with player activity and instead it's a ghost town because there's no actual content here, just hints at it. There's a really interesting bit of backstory hinting at a war between the Black and Blue Dragonflights here that made the trees turn to crystal, and the Lich King's attempt to harvest the forest's power, but it doesn't actually appear anywhere in the game that I've seen. Crystalsong is basically just a very elaborate backdrop to fly over to get to Dalaran at this point.
Another thing that's interesting when looking through the data files is how many items that ended up in Naxx and (more recently) the new five man instances were, at least during the design process, intended to drop somewhere else. For instance, here you can see various familiar shield designs but also at the top and bottom you'll notice two designs you've yet to see. One of them, the bottom design, has an art style that clearly matches the Hate-Forged Cleaver which drops in regular Halls of Reflection, and which you can find in the item files as 'axe_1h_draktharon_d_01'.
The axe and shield are hardly unique as being designed and created for an instance that they don't appear in. It's not even unique to this expansion: there are 2h sword models in the files which are named for Auchindoun, for example. What's interesting in all these models that either don't drop at all or which drop in ICC instead of the places which they are named for is what they suggest, namely that once there was the intention to have more varied raiding across Northrend instead of one large Naxxramas raid and two smaller one-encounter raids in Obsidian Sanctum and the Eye of Eternity.
Several sword models, as an example, either appear only on NPC's or in instances completely disconnected from their file names. Here, for example, we see several swords named for the Nexus, but only one of them drops in the Eye of Eternity raid, the rest all drop in Naxxramas (or Forge of Souls in the case of one of the reskins). Again, this isn't terribly unusual: several of the original sword models in the first release of World of Warcraft have names that hint at a faction bias that never came to pass, for example. We can, however, speculate that perhaps there was to originally have been more expansive content at Utgarde Keep, Drak'Tharon/Gundrak and the Nexus than actually came to pass, and that several of the art assets and models originally designed for these zones ended up moving to other instances like Naxxramas 25. (Naxx 10 more or less just re-used original Naxx 40 models.)
Now, at this point I hasten to add I am just speculating. I have no way of knowing and have found no conclusive comments from Blizzard saying "Yeah, we were going to do a bunch more raids but then we didn't and we just focused on Naxx instead" but it is clear that there was a great deal of work put into designing item models for zones that they never appeared in or appeared only on NPC's such as Ulduar. (And yes, I still wish that big Blinkstrike looking 2h had dropped somewhere, but I'm glad to see that axe and 2h sword get into player hands.) It's hard not to get caught up in wondering what Wrath would have looked like with more raids at start... one can imagine an Utgarde Keep with a UP raid on top. The place certainly seems big enough for a raid with King Ymiron having gotten a lot of build up in Howling Fjord only to then sort of fizzle out by being farmed constantly by pre-Naxx guilds looking for a Red Sword of Courage.
Likewise, both Drak'Tharon Keep and Gun'Drak just look overdesigned for the amount of content accessible: there's multiple structures and portals at Gun'Drak. Not only does Drak'Tharon look like you could easily have another instance there, the one we have is kind of confused and unfinished to me. Who exactly is the Prophet Tharon'ja? He looks vaguely like the Avatar of Hakkar from Sunken Temple... is he intended to be the harbinger for the various priests of the animal gods we encounter cannibalizing their own gods in Zul'Drak? Because we already have one of those, and he actually looks identical to Tharon'ja until you drain him for Quetz'lun's spirit. I'm fascinated by the lore hints in all the Zul'Drak instances (heck, the animal gods from Zul'Aman show up! Thankfully they didn't hold a grudge) and so, the idea that there was a possible raid exploring this in more depth and maybe explaining what exactly gave them the idea of eating their gods in the first place would have been fine by me. Maybe we could even find out what that enormous serpent tail in Gundrak is connected to.
I have no idea why, if there was work on UP and Drak'Tharon raids, that work was stopped. Then again, I don't know why Azjol-Nerub didn't pan out as an underground zone or why Crystalsong just sits there like an endless footnote in the Nexus war. I don't even know why we kill Malygos, Aspect of Magic and lord of the Blue Dragonflight, two raid tiers before we fight his undead consort. An argument could be made for Malygos as an immediate and arbitrary threat that needed to be dealt with, of course. It's just always seemed odd to me that we killed Malygos, empowered by Norgannon himself as Aspect, and then we go to the Titan-constructed prison of Ulduar and there's no real connection between the two events. It sometimes feels that in their drive to put Arthas on center stage they took the spotlight away from others too soon, and left a lot of interesting ideas undeveloped.
I've always wished they'd forgotten about Wintergrasp and its weird Titan structures and done AN as the PvP zone. Man, imagine mass battles crawling through the depths, fighting both the other faction and hordes of faceless ones? I'd be so down for that. Alas, as we approach the Fall of the Lich King and the oncoming Cataclysm, the possibility of seeing any of these underdeveloped or undeveloped ideas becomes ever more remote.Several sword models, as an example, either appear only on NPC's or in instances completely disconnected from their file names. Here, for example, we see several swords named for the Nexus, but only one of them drops in the Eye of Eternity raid, the rest all drop in Naxxramas (or Forge of Souls in the case of one of the reskins). Again, this isn't terribly unusual: several of the original sword models in the first release of World of Warcraft have names that hint at a faction bias that never came to pass, for example. We can, however, speculate that perhaps there was to originally have been more expansive content at Utgarde Keep, Drak'Tharon/Gundrak and the Nexus than actually came to pass, and that several of the art assets and models originally designed for these zones ended up moving to other instances like Naxxramas 25. (Naxx 10 more or less just re-used original Naxx 40 models.)
Now, at this point I hasten to add I am just speculating. I have no way of knowing and have found no conclusive comments from Blizzard saying "Yeah, we were going to do a bunch more raids but then we didn't and we just focused on Naxx instead" but it is clear that there was a great deal of work put into designing item models for zones that they never appeared in or appeared only on NPC's such as Ulduar. (And yes, I still wish that big Blinkstrike looking 2h had dropped somewhere, but I'm glad to see that axe and 2h sword get into player hands.) It's hard not to get caught up in wondering what Wrath would have looked like with more raids at start... one can imagine an Utgarde Keep with a UP raid on top. The place certainly seems big enough for a raid with King Ymiron having gotten a lot of build up in Howling Fjord only to then sort of fizzle out by being farmed constantly by pre-Naxx guilds looking for a Red Sword of Courage.
Likewise, both Drak'Tharon Keep and Gun'Drak just look overdesigned for the amount of content accessible: there's multiple structures and portals at Gun'Drak. Not only does Drak'Tharon look like you could easily have another instance there, the one we have is kind of confused and unfinished to me. Who exactly is the Prophet Tharon'ja? He looks vaguely like the Avatar of Hakkar from Sunken Temple... is he intended to be the harbinger for the various priests of the animal gods we encounter cannibalizing their own gods in Zul'Drak? Because we already have one of those, and he actually looks identical to Tharon'ja until you drain him for Quetz'lun's spirit. I'm fascinated by the lore hints in all the Zul'Drak instances (heck, the animal gods from Zul'Aman show up! Thankfully they didn't hold a grudge) and so, the idea that there was a possible raid exploring this in more depth and maybe explaining what exactly gave them the idea of eating their gods in the first place would have been fine by me. Maybe we could even find out what that enormous serpent tail in Gundrak is connected to.
I have no idea why, if there was work on UP and Drak'Tharon raids, that work was stopped. Then again, I don't know why Azjol-Nerub didn't pan out as an underground zone or why Crystalsong just sits there like an endless footnote in the Nexus war. I don't even know why we kill Malygos, Aspect of Magic and lord of the Blue Dragonflight, two raid tiers before we fight his undead consort. An argument could be made for Malygos as an immediate and arbitrary threat that needed to be dealt with, of course. It's just always seemed odd to me that we killed Malygos, empowered by Norgannon himself as Aspect, and then we go to the Titan-constructed prison of Ulduar and there's no real connection between the two events. It sometimes feels that in their drive to put Arthas on center stage they took the spotlight away from others too soon, and left a lot of interesting ideas undeveloped.
Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Instances, Expansions, The Burning Crusade, Lore, Leveling, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 9)
Lilkitten Dec 28th 2009 6:52PM
Actually on a Warcry.net interview not to long ago Rob Pardo admitted introducing arena's were the single biggest mistake they ever did in WoW. He admitted that it took too much time and energy away from advancing the game and storyline and putting it into what they never cared about at the beginning of the game, class balance. When the game started there was nothing but world PvP and that only on PvP servers. Classes were designed around their intended roles in a PvE situation. But when they started listening to whiners complaing "oh this class is OP" is when things started going downhill and they accelerated once welfare PvP gear was introduced.
Tusker Dec 28th 2009 7:03PM
The people who design and balance classes aren't the people who design and implement raids. Blizzard is a large company. If the receptionist calls in sick, they don't ask Ghostcrawler to man the phones. Blizzard can certainly add a raid and nerf rogues (if only!) in the same patch.
Obviously there was a breakdown somewhere and parts of Wrath were rushed, but class balance isn't the reason for it. Perhaps Wrath got moved up for fear of another game (at one time Warhammer did look like a WoW-killer), or perhaps someone just talked too much pre-release about things that were on the drawing board, but that just couldn't be fit in. Whatever it was, it wasn't class balance, which Blizzard routinely adjusts in sub-patches.
Lilkitten Dec 28th 2009 7:08PM
Well Tusker, you argue with Rob Pardo then because if you read his interview on Warcry.net he specifically mentions that arena's and PvP took their focus off adding content to the game. I'm merely going by what he's saying. And your anlogy of the receptionist is way off, because for that to be relevant than they would need dev's for every little aspect of the game and they dont have thousands of dev's.
Grakaron Dec 28th 2009 7:15PM
And thats why they only have 5 levels in Cataclysm. Its not cause they dont want to have to spend resources working on PvP balance like they say, its actually cause they are giving the entire class mechanics and balance department pink slips.
No they dont have Ghostcrawler maning the phones, but they do put an emphasis on what needs to be created and coded. If they say hey, we need these hundreds of pvp things coded now, they have to put people on that, instead of coding content, they are coding Pvp balacing and garbage. They arnt some City maintenance company that has a ditch digger dude, that can only dig ditches, and is unionized so that no one else can do their job. This is how coding works, when you try to meet deadlines you bring other people onto projects to get it finished, one of the other reasons why bugs show up towards the end of coding cause your bringing in people that arnt fully aware of what they are working on
Luke Dec 29th 2009 3:42AM
An idea I've heard before that I thought was good was altering what spells and abilities do depending on whether they're being used against players or NPCs.
It's already been done to a lesser extent, with abilities like priests' Penance. Blizzard could make it so every ability has 2 sets of tooltips: A PvP one and a PvE one.
Angrycelt Dec 29th 2009 1:21PM
I totally dig the idea of balancing a team structure rather than making every class equal in potential to another.
Not everyone gets to be special. You are not a unique little snowflake.
What was the line in "The Incredibles"?
"Everyone will be super, which means nobody will be."
Kaphik Dec 28th 2009 5:25PM
The lack of Azjol-Nerub as a zone, instead it being two LEVELING instances is the biggest disappointment Wrath has for me. The lore of the Scourge is tied into the Nerubians, and it's a key part in Arthas claiming Frostmourne.
What made it worse was that AN trash didn't even drop any loot until a couple of months ago! Such a travesty that so much potential was lost, and yet we get ANOTHER zone filled with trolls.
Transit Dec 28th 2009 5:27PM
Exactly! There is a ton of areas I always wondered about.
There is that huge temple at the very end of Zul'Drak, I always thought they were going to put an instance in there. It seems to big of a item for just window dressing.
And there is that Taunaka town in Storm Peaks. A pretty developed town with a mailbox, fp, etc. But only 1 quest chain? It seems like a wasted effort.
Also in storm peaks, the Machine of the Gods? What is it for? And that friendly Titan construct patrolling it. What is his purpose?
And speaking of Titans, what about that NPC in Dragonblight that is constantly patrolling that Titan road. What is his purpose?
There seems to be a lot of this in WotLK. Then again there is that water elemental guy in the cave in Tanaris that did nothing too. lol
videvekartuspaan Dec 28th 2009 9:26PM
well the machine of the gods is actually part of a rather long alliance quest chain...... You go down in there to rescure brann bronzebeard, but come to think of it, they never really mentioned what it was:P
Delsin Dec 28th 2009 5:31PM
Ran out of time? Since when did Blizzard care about the time it takes for one of their products to ship?
Maybe doing those things may have been unviable for them. As cool as those ideas are, taking the spotlight away from THE character of the expansion may have backfired. I mean, I don't know about you, but as soon as I started playing Wrath, all I wanted was to kick down the doors of ICC. Branching off would have had people whining about why Blizzard branched off to tell those stories, instead of focusing on the main antagonist of the expansion.
Hey maybe they'll even tell these stories after ICC? But as Matt says, with the Cataclysm xpac coming, I don't think its likely
Joshua Ochs Dec 28th 2009 5:48PM
And yet instead of exploring any of those side stories, we got "a pathetic little tournament".
Raze Dec 28th 2009 6:04PM
Since Activision and Bobby Kotick started controlling their leash, time /is/ a factor, now. Quantity beats out quality is the company's philosophy.
This isn't surprising in the least. Wrath did feel particularly half-assed to me in far too many regards. The fact that a Hunter I was grouped with earlier was rocking an iLevel 245 gun that used the same model as the friggin' /heirloom/ gun is really, REALLY telling.
Avan Dec 28th 2009 6:04PM
"Maybe doing those things may have been unviable for them. As cool as those ideas are, taking the spotlight away from THE character of the expansion may have backfired. I mean, I don't know about you, but as soon as I started playing Wrath, all I wanted was to kick down the doors of ICC. Branching off would have had people whining about why Blizzard branched off to tell those stories, instead of focusing on the main antagonist of the expansion."
The Lich King wasn't always the Lick King, though. He was once Prince Arthas Menethil. Before that, there was Ner'Zhul sitting out in Northrend. The two combined create the Scourge we know today. One (NZ) created the Scourge than most lore characters knew, and exist in Eastern Kingdoms.
Even before Arthas first set foot on Northrend, things were going on there, like the war with the Nerubians and whatever the Taunka and Tuskarr were up to. There's all the stuff with the Titans up in Storm Peaks, the unused Crystalsong Forest, the Drakkari trolls, and the dragon aspects. Yet, none of the quests offer any insight into how these things were before Arthas ever set foot in Northrend, let alone what happened before he became the Lich King.
What I'm getting at is that there wasn't suddenly just a Lich King. All those side stories that they could have told might have painted us a larger picture, and show us how things have changed because of him. Show us why he's so deserving of his own expansion, instead of saying, "he's a bad guy who controls the undead, go kill him for epicz." They only touched lightly on the affected trolls. They didn't touch on the taunka or tuskarr aside for making the taunka become part of the Horde and the tuskarr be attacked by unrelated sea vrykul. There is nothing about how the dragonflights having to deal with undead, save for the attack on the ruby dragonshrine.
Instead, the Lich King is going to be a loot pinata who stopped by every few instances to taunt us. Oh no, we're all so offended by his taunts that we must now kill him solely for epicz.
snowleopard233 Dec 28th 2009 6:16PM
That and Sartharion. Was it really that important that we needed to fight yet another black dragon? They could have easily devoted that time to some other small raid that had something to do with the other enemy factions. I would have even settled for a massive room where we had to fight King Ymiron.
I just kind of feel like this expansion's story started out with a bang where we had multiple highly threatening adversaries and then fizzled out when half of them were killed in the first act. What suspense they had left, Blizzard failed to latch on to. The horde and alliance basically get side-punched by Putress at the Wrathgate, an event which shook the community to its knees. Instead of following through with this shocking surprise, the story took a somewhat acceptable sidestep into Ulduar before going completely flat with the bizarre spectacle that was the tournament.
They should have taken a bolder route from the wrath gate and continued to instill that sense of dread and uncertainty into the players. Instead, they had us safely compete in a tournament right on our adversary's front lawn. I'm willing to accept that 3.2 was a PVP patch that was light on PVE, but if that was the case, why did they sugar-coat it as some sanctuary zone Olympic bonanza? They should have had the story of that patch been focused on PVP and the brutal hatred between the Alliance and Horde that had become resurfaced at the wrathgate.
I have a great deal of respect for the writers at Blizzard and I wouldn't feel the story was so ineffectual if I didn't know they could do better, but they need to get their chops back in gear for this next expansion. Hopefully, Cataclysm, with its atmosphere of fear and destruction, will help bring some of that intensity and uncertainty that has been missing from this expansion. They just need to make sure that the tension of watching the world burn doesn't stop at patch 4.0.
zetathran Dec 28th 2009 5:50PM
I'd have to say that of all the "missing content" one of my biggest disappointments was the Chamber of Aspects. I thought that was a really neat concept, and that the other portals would be opened at some point, maybe one for each content patch, like the new Wintersgrasp bosses. I suppose the idea just didn't pan out, considering that none of the dragonflights besides Black is hostile, and so many people were hostile to the smaller raid concept of early Wrath (Maly/OS) and ToC.
Also, I'd be surprised if they released new raids in Northrend during Cata. Although BC raids had us going back to the old world for Kara and Hyjal, I think they're moving away from that considering no Wrath raids had us going back to Outlands.
tkc Dec 28th 2009 5:31PM
As for the empty spaces I'll wager an ice cold lager that they ran out of time and/or space.
If they want to ship by a certain date then at some point you have to cut off development and finalize things.
If they want to ship on a single DVD then there is only so much content can be delivered. That would also explain why some items show up in different places. It is probably a lot easier for them to use previously unused models for new content.
They can't always make it bigger. WoW is by far the biggest game I've ever seen. The PC I played vanilla WoW on would struggle mightily to play WotLK. They can't push back the release date forever either. I remember the guild I was in at the time getting stir crazy waiting for WotLK to come out.
Lilkitten Dec 28th 2009 7:02PM
The fact is not all of it was suppose to be done by release of the expansion. A lot of it was suppose to be added at a later date with content patched. Rob Pardo already has admitted that PvP has taken a lot of the dev's focus off content and they have had to work on class balance (see his interview on Warcry.net). As for space, I'm sorry, WoW is not anywhere near the biggest game around, and being on a single DVD has nothing to do with it, although everything could easily fit on a single DVD (theres this nice lil thing called compression that programmers use to store files on a disc. a dual layer disc can fit almost 9GB of data on it which could expand to over 20GB easy once installed and WoW is only taking up right at 19GB on my puter and that's with both expansions worth of data). As for PC specs playing the game, the graphics are literally years out of date, WoW is designed to run on older equipment, not the latest high end video cards, CPU's and such.
Bubsa Dec 28th 2009 5:34PM
It's because since this expansion they've been half-assing their game, in a bid to make deadlines and generate more cash.
Yeah, it's the same old same old QQ but you know what? Endless evidence like this suggest it's true.
Charlie Dec 28th 2009 6:04PM
Have you been in ICC yet? or the 5mans?
Its the best raid/dungeon content they've made yet, hands down. And were only 4 bosses into ICC.
Lilkitten Dec 28th 2009 7:21PM
You obviously haven't been in many raids because the first 4 bosses of ICC have already been successfully pug'ed the first week it was out. They were downed by my guild within less than an hour and a half of us starting the raid. That's rather sad for new content. I mean honestly, the most epic fight of this game so far was Naxx 60's Four Horsemen where the world first downing came, I believe, 4 weeks after it was released. And yet we are probably gonna kill who is spose to be the hardest boss on the game the first night he will come out. Not really that great.